I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Enabling Software To Eat The World, One API At A Time

A couple of years ago legendary Venture Capitalist and technology entrepreneur Marc Andreesen famously opined that software is eating the world. Andreesen should know, as someone who sits on the boards of Hewlett-PackardHewlett-Packard, FacebookFacebook and eBayeBay, he is both a disrupter and someone navigating a path through painful disruption. As he correctly pointed out, more and more major businesses and industries are being run on software. This trend, predicted Andreesen, is set to continue with entire industries being disrupted by software. While Andreesen focused on the macro business changes occurring, he omitted to give sufficient credit to the mechanics of this disruption, namely the API. APIs or Application Programming Interfaces, are the mechanical connection between different applications and between applications and different devices – essentially APIs are the “glue” that tie together all of the components needed to disrupt some of the most established companies and industries on earth.

But if Andreesen’s predictions are to come to fruition, APIs need to be far easier to design and deploy. The absence of this ease of creation is a significant barrier to the increasing existence of different APIs and, by extension, the rise of new and innovative software services. The difficulties around APIs fall largely in two buckets – firstly the need to API-enable existing applications and data sources and secondly the design and deployment of APIs for new applications. Some recent announcements on both counts have given hope to increasing ease of the growth of the “API economy”.

The first development I wrote about last week was vendor FairCom’s announcement of a new product that essentially allows existing COBOL applications to be connected to other applications and the mobile web. Without going into technicalities, the product replaces the COBOL fire system with a standards-based API set. This seemingly simple act is actually quite transformative, FairCom told the story of Wencor, an aircraft parts manufacturer and distributor for airline carriers, operators, repair stations and manufacturers, that has modernized its COBOL-based inventory system with FairCom. Wencor reports that while its COBOL system was reliable and accurate, accessing inventory data was difficult, and could not be done in real-time by customers and employees. By replacing the COBOL file system, Wencor was able to make inventory information available in real-time to customers through its website. An example of software eating manual processes and human intervention.

As I said at the time, this is actually pretty cool – instead of having to completely replace applications and databases, FairCom is allowing that old stuff to remain in place, but get wrapped with a set of integration tools – with no changes to COBOL code, no data duplication and no major architectural changes. Existing applications gain a new file system offering transaction processing, scalability and recoverability while hopefully expanding data availability.

The second piece of news comes today from integration vendor MuleSoft. MuleSoft provides an integration platform that allows applications, data services or API to be connected – be they on-premises or in the cloud. They’re essentially a hub where people can “plug in” different data types and applications. The problem is that creation of those APIs is still a very technical endeavor – if APIs are really the tool that unlocks broad revolutions in business, the creation of those APIs needs to be far easier. Which is where RAML comes in. RAML (or RESTful API Modeling Language, is a concise, expressive language for specifying APIs. A common lingua franca and approach for the API set if you will.

MuleSoft is today releasing broad tooling for RAML and is offering it as a free service and an open source download. With RAML, developers can build APIs with a standard approach. The need for this is obvious, as Presidential Innovation Fellow, and API thought leader Kin Lane said to me in an email interview:

The current definition of web APIs has jumped out of the SOA toolbox in the last 10 years, focusing on the simple, meaningful access of common business and government resources. This has allowed APIs to be effectively put to use across every business sector, by startups, SMBs, the enterprise and even government agencies. Even with this new ease of use, the design and deployment of APIs are still a very technical endeavor that is executed by IT and development groups. API modeling languages like RAML give the average business user the ability to describe, design and ultimately deploy APIs for any application, moving API deployment out of the realm of IT and development and closer to the problem owners within any businesses group.

These two announcements are actually pretty important, API-enabling existing applications and creating a generally recognized framework for creating APIs will allow for increasing consistency and reuse of individual APIs – this reuse and consistency will increase velocity, decrease API-related outages and generally ease the rise of the API economy. By giving developers a series of design and testing tools for APIs based on RAML specs, MuleSoft is helping organizations to embrace the opportunities that software generally, and APIs in particular, can offer them. And by allowing all those crusty old COBOL application to gain a second life, FairCom is also helping this new economy to arise.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. Read more about Ben here.

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